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How to Keep Your Email Lists Sparkling Clean

You’ve probably even noticed a growing awareness in yourself. You’ve developed an impressive ability to block out unwanted marketing messages in all their forms: popup ads, commercials, spam emails, etc.

It’s no secret that the scales of power between marketer and consumer are tilting quickly to the consumer. Marketers can no longer shout their marketing messages at consumers and hope for a response. Consumers have more resources, more options, and expect more personalization than ever before. Email is no exception to this rule.

If you are still blasting your email messages to a stale or purchased email list, you are not only wasting your time and money, you could be doing some serious damage to your brand. It is becoming more important than ever for marketers to make sure their lists are clean and up to date.

Why Should You Clean Your Lists?

Internet service providers, spam monitors, and email security services all set thresholds for what constitutes an acceptable email campaign. Your spam complaints, undelivered messages, and unsubscribes all need to be under these thresholds to avoid unwanted attention from these groups. Blasting your emails to an unqualified list could result in account suspensions from your email platform, penalties, or even fines, not to mention dismal marketing results.

Why Your Email Platform is Not a List Cleaner

When it comes to spam, your email platform has an obligation to enforce the thresholds set for spam complaints, undelivered messages, and unsubscribes. If you are emailing a stale or unmanaged list, you will likely cause a high number of all three. In these cases, you could have your account suspended by your email platform as they try to maintain their sending reputation and deliverability rates.

Email platforms, including Pardot, help you monitor your lists’ health throughout an email campaign. They will measure deliverability, bounce rate data, and unsubscribes to give you a baseline reading on how your list is doing — but keep in mind that they do not have the ability to clean your lists for you.

So How Do You Keep It Clean?

There are a number of options for keeping your lists squeaky clean. The first is to be strategic about the leads you acquire. Lead scoring and grading solutions can automatically check each lead, assess their fit for your business, and assign to a list accordingly. The second option is to allow your recipients to opt-in to receive emails. By gaining their permission first, you can ensure that your list is populated only with recipients eager to receive your content. There are also a number of online tools that will handle the cleaning and validation of your lists for you. These services can be a great way to give your lists a quick tune-up before your next campaign. Email provider MailChimp suggests the following:

Before you launch your next campaign, take a second to make sure your email list is sparkling clean. Not only will this help improve your reputation with ISPs and prevent email bans, it will deliver more responses and increase engagement.

We have been using http://www.email-validator.net to clean up our list and were really impressed by the quality of their service and the fast turnaround. Some of the addresses on our list were more than 3 years old and with the reports from Email Validator we were able to remove all the invalid addresses (40.69% of the list) before starting our campaign.